


By sleight of wing

by gogollescent



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 11:04:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13212429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: It was sometimes difficult to know that his brother was angry. Happily, Huor put an end to all doubts by flinging himself on the hearthrug with a cry.





	By sleight of wing

It was sometimes difficult to know that his brother was angry. Happily, Huor put an end to all doubts by flinging himself on the hearthrug with a cry.

“Ha!” went the cry.

“Ha,” agreed Húrin. He set down his penknife, and after a little thought his pen. Huor was drawing moon-letters in the ashes. “I was right, you look better in blue. Did she make that for you?”—meaning the wreath around Huor’s neck.

“Yes, she was all posies today,” Huor said, slowly. He removed his hat, which had irises tucked in the chin-band, and set about abusing it. There were wildflowers clinging to his beard. “She could do nothing but pick flowers and plant them.”

“You’re not good for much.”

“If I’m not, I lay it at her door…” He caught Húrin’s eye and frowned, dogged by his own unfairness, and launched on a long explanation: her mother thought them young to wed; she wouldn’t say so, for respect of Húrin, but she thought it, and they were. And Rían said, yes, of course, and spent a day dismantling turf…

Húrin had heard as much before, though never, it was true, from Rían’s mother. Morwen behind the portiere had neither changed nor lost the limping rhythm of the loom; but she was listening, anyway, for he was listening.

He had married her the autumn after his father died, and he had been four years younger than Huor now, and lord of Dor-lómin. Neither he nor his young wife had parents to give warnings. “Why is Rían in haste?”

The tail of Huor’s braid lay coiled on his back from many heartsore shrugs. “I don’t know.”

So saying, he folded his hat in two and let it flop back to its proper shape. The brim stayed pinned beneath one palm, like a dog submitting to have its paw held. He had a tender way with hounds and birds, but Húrin thought this had made him rather proud; he could be impatient, not with the animals, but with beast-tamers less patient than he. At times he turned the same unkindness on himself: why can I not be gentle, and bring my blood to heel? And so on. Húrin understood better, now he was father to two children, one living. Still such stern sight had no place in his brother.

“Let us say that she loves you, and waiting’s a grief to her. I can just conceive of it. But you wait out of love for her which warns you to feign wisdom, like an old man. I see no harm in that. Shall I speak to Rían?”

“Showing me for a youth, unfit to court her?”

“Isn’t that the object?”

“Yes!” A glare. Huor looked afraid to laugh, as if it might do his lady dishonor; his lip did tremble. “She’s young,” he said to himself, “and it falls to me to practice wisdom, if she must be so brave.” Very soft, he said, “I think of them, and their ladies who made a game of the mountain’s face… from green to red, and sparkling with frost. For them it was never wrong to wait.”

“Never and never. I hope that in a hundred years, when we are dead, our enemy all crushed beneath our weight, they may descend and gaze around. A new unconquered land, with green things growing.” He smiled at Huor, saying to himself that the future wasn’t so far off: but their sunlight was less than this sunlight, and the white cities they might raise less gorgeous than this low-timbered hall. “Is that what you have in mind for Rían?”

“It sounds as if you’d have me marry.”

“Brother, I must thrust you from my house. All means else failing—”

“What would you do with me gone?” said Huor, seriously. Then: “I have her lute. I forgot it was still on my horse when I rode off, I’m afraid in a hurry.” If he heard Húrin’s hand strike his brow, he gave no sign of it, except to stiffen a little. “Will you bring it back to her? Tell Rían we have your blessing. It makes no matter, but maybe she’ll taste the bitter less.”

Through spread fingers, Húrin considered his poor inventory—more often abandoned than taken up—and the ink now drying on the reed.

*

Rían’s mother greeted him warmly and, after he spoke her fair, tasted her beer and let her exclaim over his handsome mule, directed him to the creek bottom that dipped between the homestead and the fields. If she had asked why he had come in place of a servant, he would have said, the men are dead of weariness from threshing-season, or if not from the harvest then the raids; I of all of them can best be spared. But she was circumspect in everything.

Rían sat in a ring of toppled cups, and she was writing something down. At the sight of her, stylus in hand, he felt a jolt of guilt, having thrown over his own clerk-work for a leisure-errand—although it was his business to pay calls to malcontents. With her back to a birch slenderer than her back—with knees drawn up, feet planted, and hair curling from its net—while her maid lay snoring on a bead-fringed sheepskin, she rather than he had the air of a lady holding court; but her head snapped up at his coming, and she stared straight ahead, and almost past him, so that he felt he headed a host. “At ease, cousin,” he tried. Then her eyes found his. She nodded and rose in a bow before he could prevent her, and smiled broadly when she left it, remembering her charm.

Pretty Rían, a child in long skirts; he could guess what his brother meant, that she had begun some work and not finished it yet.

“‘Mistress cousin,’” she quoted, and showed him where to set down the lute. “‘Lady sister.’ But name me sister, if we must choose degrees.”

“You’ve disowned Morwen?”

She was losing interest. “Why come tonight? Huor—”

“Huor is hale,” he said lightly, dismayed by her insistence. “I thought I had better return the thief’s spoils for him.”

“Ha! foes!” snapped the serving-girl, and rolled over; it was no serving-girl at all, but his kinswoman Aerin. She must have crept late from Indor’s house for a drinking party, although, as Húrin had cause to know, she was not much charmed by songs of old. She narrowed her eyes, shook the sandy hair from her face, tugged the veil from her hair, and thrust a plump finger at him: then lay back down, doubtless to gather strength. Not yet dusk, but in a sky like fallen clouds, the leaves on the bough had lost color, and patterned themselves after the fox’s gray beard; the gurgling from the creek should have drowned all frogs and nightjars, but that their singing carried, bounded higher on the stream. His daughter’s laughter never sounded louder than near water; but already he had forgotten the laws that made her life.

Because he had no better plan, he lay down beside Aerin, on his back. “But do I have a case to judge between you and sir thief?”

Rían knelt in the heather and said, “Please forgive me if I am churlish, which I must be, to have driven off everyone but Aerin.” (“Thank you!”) “I’ve had evil dreams.”

Húrin bit his tongue. “Of Huor?” he said after a time, trying to be grave, and to restrain the bitter feeling, so common since Lalaith, that all this was a waste; her terror like his cheer, poured out on stone, because neither of them knew what was to come.

“Huor! No, god forbid! Of you.” She touched her brow, kneaded the skin, and bent her head. Had she been his sister in truth, he would have pinched her. And she was right that it was wearisome and hurt to hold off from things which were needful; he was glad at some hour or another every day, but it was hard, to go from his house to his friends’, his house to his brother’s, from Dor-lómin to the holdings of the elves, and back again to make friends with his son.

“That’s strange,” he began. “Though I were the fondest of brothers, I couldn’t begrudge him to you. I wish you every happiness. When your mother consents, we will set a day in spring, when the trees vie with the flowers of the earth, and there are showers enough to dress the thatch with jewels. If it should snow, we’ll hold the dancing indoors, and burn the great hall down.”

Rían nodded. As he talked on she grew thoughtful: she tapped her stylus to the tablet, and said, “In my dream, you sit in a great chair.”

“There. I am presiding at the feast. Sador is carving me the very chair. If I seem grave, he has left me a long splinter.”

“I’ll marry Rían,” Aerin announced. “All the unwedded maids of Dor-lómin; I’ll marry them and keep them, when you ride off to war.” She spoke almost without moving her lips, her chest rising and falling in starts, her cold fair face impassive. “What do you say?”

Rían whispered something in her ear; Aerin convulsed in laughter. Húrin pretended to avert his eyes and said, “Now, tell me. Is there something my brother should know?”

“That I beg his pardon,” said Rían; “I am sorry for him. Every year he must fight, facing what I know nothing of, though he has you and God, my lord, bespeaking him. I think of him often—I hope he’s not too afraid. I don’t remember a moment of my journey here, from Ladros. So maybe it’s the same for him, that he goes to fight and doesn’t remember. I wish he were younger! Then indeed I could wait happily, while we would play at being children.” She bit her knuckle.

If he only saw all, from sea to sea, and lorded it over a land that answered him: he thought he would have ordered it better. That would have been best, to know that wherever his kin went, he could follow them in mind, and understand their passing. Here she was before him, and he strove to follow her. Did she think she wasn’t a child, or that the girl had died in the wastes, driven forth from her home? She sounded, it was true, older than her years, not like a woman grown but like a daughter of the elves, clear-spoken before milky eyes could see.

“He pities you as well,” Húrin said. He got up in a crouch, for the dew was creeping down his back, and he wished too to take her hands.

Rían gave him a glad mistrustful look: face red in the cheeks from talk of Huor, and teeth bared by her drawn-up lip. She put her hands on his, saying, “Feel how cold. I have drunk too much, even with Aerin here to warn me. If I sleep early, will I still have a headache tomorrow? Will you tell Huor not to expect me before noon? My turn to visit, but alas—”

“I’ll tell him.” He might have said, grandly: Don’t punish him too much for loving your mother, but she had nothing of the kind in view. Without knowing it she took a step back and another. She was drunk, and proud enough after her fashion, and had grown used to the new wealth of time, now that Huor was home; that she feared Huor’s death in war had little to do with how they spent their days together. She picked up the lute and put together a bare chord; she played just well enough to scaffold her towering voice. If he had had the sense to bring his harp, they might have made music together, although his mount would have been overburdened, and his knees ached from sitting in the cold.

“You may as well escort me home,” Aerin said, standing more steadily, by leaning on his back. “If you have what you came for, lord?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Anyway I’m the better for having come; for it’s not every day I hear a song from Rían, bard of Dor-lómin.”


End file.
